Convicted German murderers attempt to censor all mentions of their crime from Wikipedia

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Back in 1990, Bavarian actor Walter Sedlmayr was brutally murdered. After an investigation and subsequent trial, Wolfgang Werlé and his half-brother Manfred Lauber were found guilty of Sedlmayer’s murder and sentence to prison. All of this is a matter of public record. However, nineteen years later, these same two convicted murderers are attempting to force Wikipedia to censor all mentions of their names.

The two men and their humorously named lawyers, Stopp & Stopp, are attempting to bully Wikipedia into removing the offending entries based upon a German law that allows for the protection of “names and likenesses of private persons from unwanted publicity.”

Well, wait a second. The second you kill a famous actor and are convicted in a massively publicized murder trial, you cease to become a private person. Wikipedia seems well within their rights to stand unrepentant here. But Stopp & Stopp aren’t just going after Wikipedia, instead going after multiple service providers to get their clients’ names removed from the Internet.

Not as shameful as the act of murder, but this is disgusting, and Wikipedia should resist the easy path of acquiescence. As the EFF beautifully puts it: “At stake is the integrity of history itself. If all publications have to abide by the censorship laws of any and every jurisdiction just because they are accessible over the global internet, then we will not be able to believe what we read, whether about Falun Gong (censored by China), the Thai king (censored under lèse majesté) or German murders.”